Hi Rod,
At least in Norway, it is very common for the GBIF node to receive (only) Easting and Northing of UTM zones 32V to 36W. For many datasets we will on routine automatically make the conversion to decimal degrees (and WGS84) at the node before these datasets are published to the GBIF portal. When people download occurrences from the Norwegian "GBIF portal", Artskart, my impression is that the UTM 32V (and the 33V) Easting and Northing coordinate format is actually more popular than the decimal degree format - this is because the geographic data layers for Norway more often are made available in the UTM format (most often 32V or 33V) [1]. And yes, this continued present day official use of such a wide variety of coordinate formats frustrates me too... The historic use reported with the verbatim terms, is of course difficult to do anything with...
I assume that Easting and Northing coordinates are both valid and very common values (and not only in Norway) for the Darwin Core verbatim coordinate terms (dwc:verbatimLatitude and dwc:verbatimLongitude or dwc:verbatimCoordinates), but of course only at all useful when accompanied by the respective dwc:verbatimCoordinateSystem and dwc:verbatimSRS also reported. (And that the dwc:decimalLatitude and dwc:decimalLongitude correctly reported in WGS84 should preferably also always be there). I believe that Darwin Core is already fine with respect to terms to report geographic coordinates. If at all any additions are useful, I believe that identifying and recommending terms from more specialized geographic vocabularies and ontologies might be much more useful than adding any new dwc:Location terms to Darwin Core. In fact, most of the dwc:Location terms might perhaps preferably be replaced by terms from the geography community... such as perhaps [2] and [3] (as a start).
[1] https://dagendresen.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/convert-coordinate-srs/ [2] http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos# [3] http://www.geonames.org/ontology/documentation.html
Regards Dag
On 7 February 2015 at 13:02, Roderic Page Roderic.Page@glasgow.ac.uk wrote:
Pardon my ignorance, but has there ever been a discussion of easting and northing values in regards to Darwin Core? AFAIK the current standard doesn’t mention them. The reason I’m asking is that I’ve just come across some VerbatimLatitude and VerbatimLongitude values in a dataset that is aggregated by VertNet (and hence GBIF) where (after some head scratching) I realised that the verbatim values were actually Easting and Northing (which I didn’t know existed until yesterday). Details are here: https://github.com/ttu-vertnet/ttu-mammals/issues/11
I’m guessing this isn’t a terribly common way to record location information, but it looks like in this case the lack of support for this type of data has resulted in somebody trying to shoehorn them into VerbatimLatitude and VerbatimLongitude, resulting in values which are uninterpretable to aggregators further up the chain.
Regards
Rod